Ask Alex Gibney if he trusts Lance Armstrong and the director very quickly grows silent, stares at the brownish hotel carpet and finally says: “Yes …. with verification.”

If it seems like a wishy-washy answer, it is, because when Gibney first set out to capture the dimensions of the Armstrong narrative, he was doing so from a fan’s perspective.

In fact, the original title for his planned documentary was The Road Back — what Gibney, the Oscar-winning director of Taxi to the Dark Side and Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, felt would be a classic story of overcoming obstacles to win the day.

“It was a comeback story, but it was also intended as a double-entendre, that the comeback would mean a certain reckoning with the past,” Gibney says.

The whole journey started in 2008, when Armstrong came out of retirement and announced he would make one more bid for a Tour de France title and a yellow jersey. Gibney would simply follow the leader with a camera crew, and capture all the heroic suffering, as well as the seemingly inevitable glory.

Yet, it wasn’t very long before the Lance Armstrong story collided with a semi-trailer loaded with lies, coverups, harassment and fraud. The reigning cyclist finally admitted to cheating and using performance-enhancing drugs, causing a chain reaction of dismay, disgust and eventual disenfranchisement from the world of pro sports and big money endorsements.

For Gibney, however, it was still good content — even if he’d been left bruised by his belief in the once-towering sports figure.

“Selfless is not a word I would use to describe Lance,” Gibney says. “Though he does embody a sense of the American ideal. When I went to visit him for the first time at his house in Austin, Texas, he was impressive and charismatic. He’s not warm and cuddly. He feels like a majestic creature — he has a certain power. Power is what you see in Lance, and surrounded by his impressive art collection and his jerseys, it’s hard not to feel impressed by what he is.”

Gibney says empathizing or even admiring your subject is not a bad thing for a documentary filmmaker, but it can make things more challenging. And as a result, The Armstrong Lie proved a little trickier than previous Gibney efforts — even his Oscar-winning chronicle of torture in Taxi to the Dark Side.

“What originally intrigued me was his ruthless will to win,” Gibney says. “That ruthless will to win is something that I think we both admire and, in the middle of the night, we are appalled by it. But it does embody the American ideal, and I think that was the Enron story, too.”

Gibney says before the lid blew off Enron’s bogus financials, everyone in the media and the Wall Street community was in love with Enron.

“Enron was the all-American company until it wasn’t,” he says. “Enron created this fantastic lie that everyone believed and it was because we wanted to believe in this new model for capitalism. And everyone was making lots of money. It was a good story,” he says.

“It’s the same with Lance, in a way. Everyone wanted to believe and everyone was making a lot of money. But Lance concocted a lie that was so big, it had to do with his essential story. If he was accused, he would always act outraged: ‘How dare you? I, as a cancer survivor, would never take performance-enhancing drugs!’ That was inspiring, but also devastating when the truth was known.”

Gibney says there isn’t much sympathy for the Enron folk, nor for Armstrong at this stage, but that only makes the cautionary tale element of his saga more pressing.

“Like Enron, Armstrong was ruthless in attacking his accusers. And the whistleblowers were poorly treated. Even the woman who blew the whistle on Enron was attacked. I remember going on tour with the film and there was more anger about the whistleblower than the people who lost everyone’s money.”

Gibney says people do things that often don’t make moral sense, but that’s what he loves about being a documentary filmmaker.

“I think people reveal themselves, and my job is to uncover things. Even in the way I interview people, I’m not generally confrontational or trying to make myself look better at their expense. My job is to try to understand what is going on,” he says.

“Sometimes people lie and my job is to understand how that works. But I’m not in the monster business. If you present someone as a monster, they have no relevance to the rest of us. It becomes very convenient for us to wipe our hands and move on.”

“I did feel a sense of betrayal and that I had been used as part of Lance’s PR machine. And that did piss me off. But Lance went through a period of time before Oprah when he started to reach out to people, including a number of his critics, and to me, to explore the idea of ‘How do I tell my secret to the world?’ I give him credit for that,” Gibney says.

“He didn’t have to do that.”

Then again, Armstrong always seems to do what’s best for Armstrong. And in this case, coming clean was the best marketing option available to salvage his empire. But Gibney says The Armstrong Lie is not the Armstrong Apology.

“I think what you get is a revealing portrait of who Lance Armstrong is. You see glimpses of his cruelty and that sense of self-pity that comes from people who feel alienated by success, “ he says.

“But it’s a matter of truth and lies, and when someone lies to you a bunch of times, it’s hard to trust them again. And I think people will watch this film and think, ‘Well, why should I trust him?’ … And that’s for them to answer.”